Words in the King James Version that now mean something else: Have you ever run across these and wondered what they meant?

Well, work on issue #100 of Christian Historymagazine, on the King James Bible, is almost completed. By March we expect to have it out to many previous subscribers, plus those of you who have signed up for a free copy here. Meanwhile, what with allotting pages to articles and moving things around, the following nifty “Did You Know” piece will likely be pushed out (it was squeezed out when I realized that one page was not enough space to do justice to the KJV’s fascinating chief translator, Lancelot Andrewes). So what better place to share it than here on Grateful to the Dead?

The following are just a few of the more than 500 words that could trip up modern readers of the King James Version, because they now mean something different—often very different!—than they did in the early 1600s when the KJV was being translated.

addicted devoted, 1 Cor 16:15. And this one, though more understandable, could also cause considerable confusion in the modern reader.

allow (1) approve, Luke 11:48; Rom 14:22; 1 Thess 2:4. (2) accept, Acts 24:15. (3) know, Rom 7:15. Just as with modern English, KJV terms can have two, three, or even more meanings. And all of them can be remote from our modern understandings.

amazement terror, 1 Pet 3:6. A much stronger and more negative meaning. We’ve sort of domesticated this word, haven’t we?

bruit report, Jer 10:22; Nah 3:19. This is a fun archaism still used in the jocular “schoolboy English” of 20th-century British literature, often in the phrase “bruited about,” referring to a widely disseminated piece of gossip or other information; as in, “it was bruited about that the bishop kept a secret mistress.”

by and by immediately, Matt 13:21; Mark 6:25; Luke 17:7; 21:9. Today, “by and by” seems to have the opposite meaning—something that will happen eventually.

careful anxious, Luke 10:41; Phil 4:6. So, in the Sermon on the Mount, “Be careful for nothing” means, “don’t let anything make you full of care,” that is, “make you anxious.”

flagons cakes of raisins, Song 2:5. flagon(s) of wine cake(s) of raisins, 2 Sam 6:19; 1 Chr 16:3; Hos 3:1. Wow! Almost as bad a mix-up here as the one revealed in 2001 by Quranic scholar Christoph Luxemberg, who concluded that the “seventy virgins” promised in paradise to Muslim men martyred for their cause were actually, owing to an unfortunate misunderstanding, raisins. Imagine the disappointment.

Thanks for visiting my historical playground!

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